ADHD Research for Everyone

About Me

I am a mother of four that aspires to earn a PhD. Why I didn’t get a PhD before I had children I’ll never know. This blog was started to follow my journey to PhD, but I hit a few bumps on the way.

A couple of years ago I was teaching composition classes and finishing my masters degree. At the same time, my kids started having major issues in school. My fourth grader’s grades started to tank. Missing assignments, uncompleted assignments plagued our every day. I would check online and keep up with her so she could pass her classes. Outside of school, people would make comments about how smart she was, but in school she was drowning. At the same time, I was getting reports about my first grade son. He was unable to pay attention in class and preferred to be hugged by all of the ladies he worked with. He was coming home with packets of unfinished paperwork. He was still performing well on tests, but the busy work and other homework was causing hours of homework every night.

On top of that, I run the office for my husband’s business. He is not naturally organized, so I was keeping up with that, as well. I finally had to quit school and teaching just to keep up with everything. I was drowning trying to help my family.

So, after an unproductive meeting with school staff on how to help my son, I decided to home school him and his sister. That was a very enlightening year. Over the course of the year I was able to see what the teachers were experiencing. I took my son to a clinical psychologist, where he was diagnosed officially with ADHD. In the diagnosis meeting, as I learned about the different types of ADHD, I realized that my daughter had the Inattentive sub-type, and that was the root of her school issues. I also realized that my husband had it, too.

The year I homeschooled (2014-2015) was a trying year. Teaching kids with ADHD is no joke. At the same time, my youngest was struggling in kindergarten. He learned nothing that year. He was showing signs of dyslexia and a global speech delay. And I was still running our family business. I had to put my own degree on hold for a year.

Now, we are trying to reintegrate into the school system. I will share a lot of our struggles in this blog. The hardest thing about dealing with ADHD and my youngest son’s own issues is that they look normal. That’s why ADHD has a bad rap. There is no cast or deformation that is easy for people to see, so they assume that kids with ADHD have some kind of character flaw. ADHD is not a character flaw. It is a neurobiological condition, and deserves empathy.